https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PpWxe1kGOTA
So hello everybody, I’m sitting here with Christian Roy. For those who follow the channel, you have probably seen my past interviews with him on Jacques Hilleul and some McLuhan as well, and the question of Technicity, the problem of technology. And so he has recently written an article on Marshall McLuhan and his relationship differences to Orthodoxy, because Marshall McLuhan was a Catholic, looking at the places of contact with Orthodoxy, but also the differences and also the possibility within McLuhan of understanding how his ideas connect to symbolic world and to symbolic vision. And so I really thought it would be a great opportunity to explore a little more Marshall McLuhan’s work, see how it connects to symbolism, and also see how he was able to perceive some of the things that we are seeing happen around us in terms of technology, in terms of social transformation. And so I’m really looking forward to this conversation. This is Jonathan Pageau, welcome to the symbolic world. So, Christophe, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your experience with McLuhan. I know the text that you wrote for us was already presented at a conference beforehand. Yeah, it was at the the Faith and Works, McLuhan Faith and Works conference in Winnipeg St Paul University in 2015. It’s centered on the religious dimension of McLuhan’s thought and activity, which has often been overlooked, but which has surfaced more in the discussion since the publication of this book by his son, Eric, who The Medium and the Light Reflections on Religion, which is a collection of some of McLuhan’s articles and letters pertaining to religion. It appeared in 1999, I believe, and actually I won’t dwell on it because James Cortides already has in his introduction to his own reading of my recent article on McLuhan for the blog. So, well, it was, I guess, among my first direct engagements with McLuhan, which has informed my thought for maybe decades, probably since the 1980s, my thought on technique. So I’m a bit of a dabbler in his thought, but it’s so nourishing that even concentrating on a couple of articles like We’re Going to Do It, you know, you could have a whole seminar on that, but we’ll pick on certain issues that stand out in ways that will bring something to everyone’s thinking on symbolism. And so one of the things that I find fascinating with McLuhan, and I think that he’s really illuminating, is the manner in which he talks about technique as an extension of the human person. As you know, this is something that I’m very fascinated with in terms of the symbolism of the garments of skin, but McLuhan really emphasizes on the techniques of information, like media, writing, but then today with television and all the different media as extensions of the psyche. And so he really tries to show how this extension of the psyche is different than just, let’s say, physical technologies like cars and all that. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about his understanding of this extension of the psyche. Well, it’s more down to earth than that. It’s an extension of the nervous system, because technologies are extensions of specific organs as they appear in human history. The wheel is an extension of the foot, while the house also is an extension of the skin. This could go on for every medium. You can identify what does this extend in man’s basic physical equipment. And on a physical basis, okay, so the basic historical, anthropological distinction for him is between aural, odd-ile, tactile cultures, which is sort of the baseline of mankind through most of its history, and visual-dominated cultures that are structured by the phonetic alphabet that first appear when Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, that is, where the letters, the characters correspond to sound completely independent of any association with their shape, etc. It’s completely arbitrary, but that gives amazing flexibility in applications to classify things and order them, categorize them, and that extends the reach of man, but it also extends a specific sense, which is the eyes. Normally, at the baseline of aural or most traditional cultures, the common sense is, I guess, well, there’s a certain balance in the sensorium, in the general distribution of emphasis between the different sensory inputs, but the ones that can be said to give the tone for the whole thing is more the hearing and touch, which are related, because touch involves, it’s also about gaps. When you touch something, you don’t merge with it. There’s a sensitive gap, a resonant gap, you would say, and so there’s a continuity between that and sound. Now, these sensations tend to be non-specific. They’re low-definition, and they surround you, and you can’t focus, you can’t close your ears, you know, you hear things in an environmental way, so you receive all of the experience kind of simultaneously, but in a sense, in a kind of heterogeneous way, discontinuous way, because things will stand out in very local ways that you can’t really standardize. It’s just all jumbled together, and if there is an order to emerge from that, it’s through a kind of whole-body attunement. When you listen to something and you attune yourself to the whole environment, which will, in this context, in our normal culture, will be the whole tribal communal environment, but there’s not much of a distinction between the individual and the group. This distinction really arises once you have, with the phonetic alphabet, you have to focus while abstracting from context. You have to focus on the characters, and you have a kind of, let’s say, a mental image, a very schematic mental image, a concept, so you have a kind of pinpoint ability which you can use to sort things in very sectorial ways, so you can make the space more continuous. Therefore, you can have citizens with equal rights in a community called the polis, the city, and have statues that are very clear and realistic, etc. It’s very detailed because you can sort of surround visually what is given to you in experience surveys, make it into the sum of individual parts, rather than a kind of whole-body experience that you just receive everything like a vision. A vision is kind of an acoustic thing. There are many apparent paradoxes like that, but you receive things sort of frontally wherever you look in an acoustic state because it’s all kind of an apparition out of nowhere, like out of a fog or in the dark, whereas with a visual emphasis, the light is turned on, and everything is a very clear outline. There are few surprises there, whereas everything is more or less a surprise in an acoustic space. It’s like being in a fog, you’re sort of in wonder at whatever happens. You have a more magical or sacred relationship. If the lights are turned on and everything is sort of in its single place and not in ambivalent positions that could move without warning, it’s much more predictable. A control of the environment is more possible there. Now the classical Greeks were the first to pioneer that and to give us some of the key the basic elements of Western civilization, but things reverted to a more striable and acoustic conditions in the late Roman Empire and in the Near East, etc. In the Middle Ages, these were largely still acoustic culture even though they wrote manuscripts. Now what changes everything is the advent of print. I’ve argued in my article that the shift to visual dominance and McLuhan recognized this at the very around the time of the great schisms. There was already a kind of visual bias, but it came to a head with interchangeable print where you could sort of … this segmentation, categorization, standardization could have a kind of mass dimension that could heighten individual identity and also non-local collective identity like nations and churches and sects had to be defined in yes or no in or out terms that were very sharp. There had been a multiplication of sects and of nation-states rather than broad universal jurisdiction where you had a kind of I guess a fractal relation between the local unit and the universal one. Now you had these standardized holes on a national or ideological scale. Now this started to change. That’s the Gutenberg galaxy, but that begins to shift to the title of McLuhan’s famous 1962 book that’s one of the first that made him famous on this revolution caused by print. Now that’s followed that something changes altogether with the new electric media that began with a telegraph in the 1840s followed by radio, telephone, television computers. These are electric media. They’re a new environment and what they emphasize is what the organs they emphasize in different ways is the central nervous system itself. So it’s your neural wiring, both physical and cerebral, that is altered. It’s now centered on this external wiring of well physical wires and now in a wireless way a kind of diffuse global environment which is what he meant by the global village which has like the original aural village acoustic properties where again things like symbolism can find new currency in the way that they could not in the visual-dominated rationalistic methodical and quantitative oriented world of the Gutenberg galaxy. So there are new opportunities I guess for interesting symbolism and for him it shows in the new receptivity of contemporary man for tribal peoples, oriental religions, and even the oriental forms of Christianity. That’s what my article dealt with. So these are the neo-acoustic traditions, the neo-tribal environment that is created by the extensions of the nervous system outside our body so that we have now actually our self and our consciousness is mostly outside of us. So I think to me one of the things that makes it difficult for me to kind of get into McLuhan is at first his terminology. For example this aural versus visual terms. At first you wonder why like you kind of wonder what he’s saying because like you said that there are certain aspects which you could say is visual but he considered more aural tactile depending on its kind of integrative. Yeah exactly. So it ends up being more about something which is more kind of holistic this kind of holistic experience versus something which is focused and segmented. And so if you understand it that way then his terms start to make more sense and you can see how the progression that he talks about in terms of the Gutenberg galaxy or the Gutenberg explosion in terms of this you know this hyper focus this technical possibility of putting knowledge in books in a way that was not possible before because in the world of the manuscript even let’s say in the world of the ancient text you would have a line of text so people don’t realize that in ancient manuscripts there was no separation between words you would just have a line of text which would cross the entire page and the person reading because it was low definition as you as you mentioned the person reading would have to by his inner knowledge separate the words separate the paragraphs separate the sentences and so with the Gutenberg explosion there is a need to create these clear sentences paragraphs punctuation all of this becomes hyper focus all of this is happening at the same time there’s a shift in thinking it seems yeah and individual access to standard text it starts with the bible you know there even the standardization the absolute standardization of all text becomes necessary because we’re printing them so we need to until now there’s some variability which exists in the manuscripts because of transcription errors because of you know different traditions of manuscripts that are somewhat standardized but then when then we get to the printed text it has to be standardized and dialex also you have to standardize national languages that are that are uniform within certain certain boundaries and that that that applies to all of society it has to be a uniform so that there’s interoperability between the all the all the agencies and manifestation of these new extensions of man they don’t function if they don’t have standardization on a certain territory and now all that is is is upended when it becomes electric because there’s the boundaries are fuzzy things that happen you know and on on on on more and more of a global well of course the world had been globalized by capitalism explorations as well by already under gutenberg but it it happens at the less territorial and more directly experiential level through the media themselves starting with the telegraph radio etc television and now computers so that that becomes the primary reality actually of how we experience even ourselves in order to to these reflections of these extensions well you know just look at smartphones they’ve become a new organ that they’ve had for a dozen years and our self our very identity is complete is centered in it now if someone loses their phone they lose their face their public face and we come back that’s why we come back to a to a and and and a shame culture as opposed to a guilt culture which was a hallmark of more of a of the gutenberg galaxy and alphabetics we come back to oral conditions where the worst thing that can happen to you is is to lose face to be canceled to not not have a good reputation in your in your immediate communities to be shunned by your village which is now the global village cancel culture yeah cancel culture is definitely part of it we also notice in the in the age of the cell phone in the age of of the internet especially we can see the breakdown of grammar there’s a deliberate breakdown of grammar in order to manifest tribal affiliation you can see that in mean culture where they will on purpose miss someone who can spell the word word will on purpose misspell words in order to to create a sense of tribal yes tribal group and so mcluhan even already in the 1960s was seeing this retribalization which he talks about through electric media of course he didn’t have the internet at the time but he was definitely foreseeing something like the internet in the in the mcclue in the playboy article which he gave he really does talk about you know this this interconnectivity and this this exteriorization and and how it’s going to lead to retribalization what’s fascinating about his interpretation is that he he was predicting you know he was predicting a a return to ethnic conflict a return to tribal conflict in terms of nations and everything one of the things i don’t know if he foresaw was rather what you know what people are talking about right now in terms of memetic tribes which is that we we have broken down into tribes but these tribes are these strange ideological tribes which are not centered in space and so you have online tribes which which connect to each other and these online and they’re not related to your local they’re not spatial they’re not spatial they’re entirely in this this new the subtle dimension of an altered psyche of an outer worrying of an outer brain really an outer collective planetary brain yeah that’s what they are and you just mentioned the the the the you know mcluhan article and people we should we should i guess specify what we’re talking about this this interview is based aside from our own article on two mcluhan’s two contributions to to playboy magazine which are actually probably the best introduction to his to his talk there’s this famous a very long interview in the the the april 16 1969 issue which is very well known included in anthologies like this one the essential mcluhan there’s also a less known article by him april 19 no december 1968 which we also read the information of this interview so but the the the sort of mcluhan interview in playboy it is one of the he didn’t like interviewing he would he would just sort of ramble out you know spin out his ideas he didn’t like the interview format because it would pin him down you know and and now extensions of man yeah you can turn it off and then yeah i’ll cut that out don’t worry well i think it’s it’s pretty good it illustrates my point yeah exactly i feel like like i’ve cut a limb yeah you cut a limb off and thrown his phone away um but uh well throughout your eye if it offends you and you know uh if it if it causes you to sin and and probably it’s something that i think in his more sober sober moods he might countenance you know and i like to cut that off yeah and of course to him with electric conditions it’s it the deal is a near for an eye you know an ear for now yeah and then he mentions that in his article so so mcluhan saw the this retribalization one of the things that i i struggle with are one of the things that i’m i see that he talks about but i’m not sure i don’t know how clearly he saw it or if he was just kind of he seemed to have some weird kind of prophetic capacity is he talks about retribalization he talks about the breakdown this return to these tribal identities you can say this is something that i’ve noticed as well the return of identity in different manners is it seems to be coming back uh you know in some scary and some more interesting ways but then he also talks about how that will lead or that is also part of this global village and so on the one hand you have a retribalization but on the other hand you have what he talks about in terms of moving towards a kind of unifying world or a unified world under this new global consciousness or this this conscience that will rise above the yeah well it’s not it’s less it’s less under or over but that’s as you know it’s it’s well yes it’s it’s it’s hard to follow him there because i mean because there’s these two aspects tribalization and global consciousness so the tribal aspect that what he described in 1969 is that there too is as amazing resonance he talks about the the the the the the impending civil war of the united states that will not will not survive long as a unified country will will break up into many states along racial and regional lines the problem is that if i don’t know if he he would have seen that what he’s suggesting has become even more complicated through this mimetic tribe and so it’s it’s almost now impossible to think of the united states breaking down in regional that’s it yeah because because now it’s it’s all through the system you have these these these different groups that are set up and these tribes are entirely online really yeah you don’t have much of a geographic base unless unless people come out and start building buildings as we’ve seen as we saw this year it’s like the conflict is all is emerging is popping out into the into the real world right now but it starts online exactly it all starts online it’s it is yeah you’re totally right it’s and cancel culture is is based online um and so this is really i mean this is the place where i struggle although it’s like i struggle to understand him because he talks about a return to mimetic or he doesn’t use the medic but a return to tribalism a a less individualized society a society which is more based on group affiliation uh but then he also talks about this kind of desire for global consciousness and i see it to me it doesn’t make sense but i see it around me everywhere that is the narrative that is being proposed to us in terms of global culture is exactly that right yeah is it is a kind of it’s a kind of idea of of of like a diversity but at the same time everybody is in the same global culture there’s an element of that but he’s not being ideological here no from it from it you know his own stance really basically he’d like to be a hobbit you know that that’s he’d like to be in a constant small scale uh craft base semi-scribble culture that didn’t really change but he has to deal with the the culture in which he’s born and he tries not to have value judgments about it so he’s just describing it and yet he so it sort of plays with what it could become it could be something not that bad something actually like a village except on a different scale but which could also be a nightmare you know so well one of the most astounding two images that he proposes in the same interview in this paper interview is that on the one hand he moves at first he’s talking about media but then he moves in a weird mystical space where he talks about what’s coming as replacing or being analogous to the to the the body of christ in the church but at a global scale and so there’s a there’s a strange move towards this image but then he also says maybe it could also be the antichrist yeah and so and so i’m wondering if he and other places if you’ve seen him talk about this or what he what would differentiate that and if not what you think would differentiate the two so i’ve been thinking about that because it’s rarely clear i mean for every instance where he seems to lean in one direction you can find another where he leans the other and that happens in this very within a couple of pages in this playboy interview that’s what happens you know it could fulfill the times on the on a galactic scale you know it’s kind of i mean it’s well it’s transhumanist territory really you know it’s a kind of a global consciousness that would have shifted with no distinction between the individual and the collective and would expand throughout the the universe and reshape it in a kind of artistic way it would sort of refashion itself in an artistic way well that’s his optimistic hypothesis well i want to come back first to the to the to the the the the tension with the how can that happen at the same time as the as the re-tribalization well what’s in common is that in both and both the tribal and the global level the individual sort of merges back into the more oral collective i guess he suggested since it’s the same electronic elements even these tribal conflicts are well they could settle well he’s talking in 1969 it could settle into some some kind of accepted diversity where where every tribe would appreciate the other one as a tribe within this common element well he doesn’t i mean other places he says well the global village is not about you know peace and harmony it means that that that you’re you’re always too close for comfort and looking over your shoulder and thinking that that someone might have cursed you and you have the evil eye you know and and you’re almost you’re on the edge of being at each other’s throat and and so it’s not it’s not a cozy place so you know so he always but his way of thinking is by sending out probes you know by by in a sense throwing literally literally try throwing out ideas into this new environment and see what sticks you know playing playing with them and see what how what echo will come back see what so some different probes different instances of his of his speculations give different results at different times so they’re all possibilities to to entertain but but i guess at that at that at that particular fireside chat he was in was in a relatively good mood so he tried to entertain the more positive the positive side of thing where he thought that maybe the creativity that he drew personally from it from his his his literate culture and then the avant-garde figures in in in in in in in western literature that that sort of foresaw the changes ahead maybe if if that the creativity of a joys or a pound or an elliot it maybe it could be shifted to the to the to the global electric neo-acoustic uh environment which the the the uh the the foreshadowed in in in their work so that’s an optimistic hypothesis but what my my my perception of that is you can’t have creativity on a kind of uh for for a collective brain on a on a on a on the planet on the scale of a planet you have to have a embodiment in a finite self that has to to find its ways around the the the the different dimensions of its of its finitude in in space and time and and the uh a kind of aesthetic and spiritual wonder at its own contingency trying to renegotiate uh the the the different parameters of its of its embodied of of embodied existence every moment it’s something that artists do by feeling out the environments seeing how things could be experiencing and enacting how things could be reconfigured how the connections could be made with these different dimensions of the self i don’t see this being so uploaded to a collective uh uh artificial intelligence uh it would just go on you know like like a borg or whatever you know you know that that’s that i mean how else do you do you imagine something spreading like that to the to the earth and beyond you know yeah reminds me reminds me you know of the projected ending of jodorowsky’s dune you know where where there’s a kind of a a collective awakening well the messiah paul moradib is killed but everyone says i’m paul i’m paul i’m paul and the whole planet so starts to move through the universe to bring in a collective enlightenment to the whole universe of this collective conscious it’s a kind of 60s like you know it doesn’t age well well but i think that there’s something about his apocalypticism which is interesting in the sense that there you know you see in the christian tradition you’ll see this notion of the two versions of the last judgment christ talks about how the weeds and the tears are growing together and that it’s only at the end that we’ll be able to separate the wheat from the tears and so i think that maybe his intuition was something like that where he was he was seeing that in this increase in technicity that it that there’s an extreme danger an extreme extreme danger of of falsification of uh of chaos of pride but at the same time he can’t completely discount it he sees there’s also positive in it and he’s he was struggling to separate the two but it’s a it’s a it’s a strange thing because even in terms of the difference between christ and anti-christ everybody thinks that they’ll be the one who who can tell the difference but it’s it’s very different it’s very difficult to know you know that the difference between let’s say an example in scripture the difference between judas telling christ that they should use the money to help the poor and christ telling us to help the poor yeah and so what is the difference there is a difference between the two but i think that it’s easy to be seduced by by you know by one or the other that it’s easy to be seduced by the falsification and in terms of i think that in i wonder in terms of where we’re seeing it go now in terms of the little versions of what he’s talking about like something like facebook or or twitter or even google itself we can really perceive the dark aspects of this kind of global consciousness or this this this like global brain we can see it taking form in front of us and it doesn’t it doesn’t necessarily look pretty because it is too it too easily becomes a frame that can be manipulated and once we’re connected to it then that manipulation becomes 1984 style the inevitability of of of reality like that first page of google like the first page of google search has become the new frame of many people’s perception except there’s no big brother in this constellation no no no one no one’s in particular is is is ordering all of this you know and anyone who does is itself a a dispensable organ of that configuration which has a mind of its own you know our most our mind is mostly already offloaded up there and to come back to the contrast of tribalization and globalization well what we’re experiencing now is both at once tribalization heightens our fascination our absorption and migration into the global medium that’s where our being is and the more we excited about tribal country the more we we are the the the the global consciousness so and sorry for those who think that that that you know vaccines or viruses or or or whatever are going to invade your body from outside you’re already inside the beast i like to say we’re already intestinal flora in the belly of the beast yeah that you have to deal with that it’s not coming from outside you’re already being digested you’re part of its metabolism so what do we do with that yeah but would you like one of the ways to understand it this is a way that is going to scare people when i say it but to me a way of understanding it has to do with talking about the traditions of enoch right this this notion of the fallen angel or this notion of the principality which falls into the world and brings about the mechanical world or the metallurgic world that is there before the flood you know and so when we say that there’s nothing let’s say controlling it to me all bodies need principalities okay and so i can’t i do let’s say nobody in particular right but there are to me there has to be some principalities that are that are using this as a as a body and so i don’t i don’t necessarily and i don’t want to freak i don’t want people to be freaked out like i’m thinking but i think that there’s an inevitability and because the system like because the systems are geared towards our passions let’s say it’s clear that facebook and twitter use our irascible passions to stay alive that’s how they they they feed on our our our conflict with each other it matters not one with which which side you’re on in the culture world the deeper you’re in well on whatever side the deeper you you you’re you’re within the one subject that that that is uh the uh of this this whole thing that you think you’re fighting you know yeah well there has been there has been a let’s say i think there has been some efforts on part of some of the media texts to take sides but every time they really do take a side they in the end end up weakening their own beast because like you said it feeds off conflict if you say we’re going to remove extremes from this side then they’re they’re they’re weakening themselves like zuckerberg did a few days back by saying well you know the new documentary and on social media you know we’re starting to to to deal with with content so so it’s going to be under control but that’s not the point that’s the basic mcclellan point doesn’t the content is not the issue it’s the medium that’s that’s where the subject your consciousness is it doesn’t matter what what are what what is the particular uh motif emerges in that in that element it’s the element itself and how how do you even perceive this element you know like like he liked to often said uh know we’re we’re not sure who discovered water but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a fish you know you need a counter environment like him he could perceive what was happening because well as a literate man he was outside the uh uh uh electric environment to some degree but unlike other literate men of his of his day he could also he could not he could not pretend that his his familiar categories of of of written text you know shielded him from from the outside world of advertisement and and the actual life of the contents of the consciousness of his of his truth not the contents but the the the the fabric you know of the human mind as it existed in in the in the in the the the young minds he faced as a professor see so uh it’s not a matter of the of the contest what it’s the the medium itself the the the electric uh this electric psyche that we have and uh i might get into scary territory too but i like to think of it in terms of an egregore uh which is a term from from occultism about a kind of emergent collective being that that comes from an entangled of an enmeshing uh of the of i guess of different intention intentionality is different consciousness that become that become a mind of their own so a civilization or religion could be an egregore but these things you know they’re there it’s it’s a it’s a psychic entity that exists on its own well egregore means from the from the the herd you know it’s something constituted from it’s a herd mind that exists independently of its individual constituents yeah so that that thing that we’re uh uh uh uh drifting on or part of it has a mind of its own and it and it probably has some some kind of uh of uh uh of weird intentionality that we can’t fathom you know it’s a psychic entity that happens to have an electric body you know yeah but that’s where i that’s where to me at least under seeing this happen and like you said noticing it and noticing uh that its intention is beyond the individual intentions of those involved and you can see it like you can you can see that zuckerberg and uh what’s his name uh the ceo of twitter they’re there they can’t control their monster anymore they’re it’s completely out of control for them and they keep saying they’ll do it but they can’t and so you can notice that these things have a will of their own based on the very on the patterns that were set up you know in the beginning as they were coming to life and this is where to me i it helps me to understand the idea of fallen angels like it really helps me to understand what fallen angels can mean how these how principalities fall can fall into into aggregate bodies and start to manifest patterns which are are disjuncted they’re they’re real and but they’re they’re they’re destructive in the sense that they that they’re feeding on their they’re they’re feeding on each other and they’re they’re not let’s say they’re feeding on the energy of the people almost like a weird parasite but it’s not a parasite because it’s we are the ones who are giving it its energy and for it to exist and because it’s not individuated it’s kind of unvulnerable you know you can’t pin it down and say oh if we pin it if we if we if we strike it there no it won’t stay there it’s so diffuse yeah well it’s viral you know yeah yeah you know um but it and and so it to me it’s very it’s very fascinating to to see that mcclellan seems to have had even before the internet seems to have had a intuition of how this was was kind of move it where it was going um but in in order to not be too negative i think one of the things you explore in the article and one of the things i want to explore with you is because it is a breakdown of this gutenberg galaxy because this new electric world is doing electro electric acoustic world of tribalism there is in that nonetheless an opening to talk about a more symbolic vision a more connected vision and a more even within the chaos yeah to introduce a more kind of holistic coherent vision of the world but you’re leaving proof of it we are you know we you know we’re also you know psychic projections are already existing in that element and yet we point to something else maybe not outside but certainly inside each still existing embodied subject see caught up as we are in this psychic flood so it’s an element that is conducive to symbolism as well as confusion and also to the confusion of symbolism so discernment and attempts at embodied focus such as what a spiritual or ritual practice can can provide is of the essence here if we want to retain our humanity and and and and maybe recover an integrity of a different kind than just going and merging with the the the the maelstrom of the electric beast this would don’t i mean a few decades ago if you would refer to the divine what what would you show you would show a mclanjagoro 16 chapel you know a piece of meat hanging and hanging in midair and and gesturing to another piece of meat but in wonderfully realistic detail and that would be it’s the idea of the divine that it is still propagate you know that when you think of religion or it’s the it’s what make that well people who are generally spiritual now they hardly bother with that what what what they know to be spiritual is is an icon a mandala something from an archaic culture a tribal culture well and a non-guttedberg culture even a christian one yeah and that’s because of the rebalancing of the sensorium that’s happened thanks to the breakdown of the guttedberg galaxy under the impact of the marconi constellation that is now coming to its full flowering with with with our uploading in a in a in a global instantaneous electronic and cybernetic environment see so yes even even as as you know tiny microbes in the belly of the beast there we we’re still an element of we can still regain some we can ourselves become the parasites of that larger very ambiguous being yeah no no but i agree i think that this is one of the reasons why i talk about what i call the double inversion or you know this the the fool at the end which turns things back which is that in the world that is in the world of the the beast like when the the the data this beast has taken over you know those that constitute some form of normal hierarchy appear as a parasite that that finds some food actually in the belly of the beast to point people back towards the and and use i it’s like that’s why one of the reasons why i talk about monsters and peripheral things is because i can i i can because that’s where we that’s what we’re in we’re in this weird egregora of of disparate elements which are nonetheless connected together in a kind of chaotic manner and manifest will you know that in that there’s food to point back towards a kind of normal kind of normal order which also includes the monsters on the edge and includes you know the leviathan which which is this this uh this the beasts that that are on the edge um and so i think that there’s i think that there’s hope maybe not for every everything but there’s hope at least for a remainder or a small arc that can float inside the the digestive tract of the beast yeah but we have to be a sort of nimble you know well of course yeah well mcclew is you know classic simile for the situation which you know it’s it was the the the sent into the mouth strong by by graven paul you know where this this this guy is in a shipwreck his ship is is you know he’s floating around the the debris of his ship are are circling in this huge whirlpool that’s emerged in the ocean and falling into this black hole and but so he sees the end approaching with every turn every revolution of the of the mindless spin and yet he observes among the debris some that that are floating well some some faster with the current some slower some actually even opposite the current he realizes that there are some counter currents there so he manages i believe to to swim to one that that flows in the opposite direction that goes up that goes not down but up to the to the to the to the to the sea and beyond the pool of the milestone and that that was mcclewins wager you know so if we understand the medium that we’re immersed in that then that’s sucking us us into a black hole imploding before us we have to learn to swim it and you navigate the currents and countercurrent so we first have to to observe it but not necessarily in a visual way we have to feel our way through it in a sense or actually bring to bear all our all our senses including the the distinct sense that that that mcclewin saw in faith itself he described it described faith catholic faith in his in his terms as something completely different from what people understand it’s it’s not a concept in the sense of a belief or a trust etc it’s a percept it’s it’s it’s a a sense and sensibility to show to certain resonant harmonies between between realities visible and visible that that that that are like a sixth sense that get that structures the interplay of the five other ones the spiritual sense the percept which is not based on on distance but when but not on incomplete immersion either but but but in the awareness of the interplay and the resonance between different levels different currents etc so that’s what we need to to to develop and you know certain spiritual disciplines can are probably the best bet to to navigate that as as long as we’re not too stuck in their form and we can also bring discernment to just the element and that we immersed in the their resonance resonance among the among its chaotic debris the flotsam of surrounding us see there are things that we can use to build a raft and maybe guide it to the surface all right well i think that on that note of hope it’s probably a good place to finish our conversation and so i just want to i want to thank you for this this moment i hope that everybody this has been useful to kind of begin or to think about this exploration of mcclellan who was a strange in a way a strange modern prophet who perceived what was happening and i think that i think he’s done your call for us to be aware of where we are not be naive about the environment in which we are living so that we can navigate it as best we can so that we can change the death into something better yeah so thanks for your time christen thank you i hope you enjoyed this discussion on marshall mcclellan as you might know the symbolic world is not just these videos but is also a blog there is also a podcast and there’s also a facebook group where people discuss all these different ideas on symbolism so make sure to check that out there is also a clips channel which breaks apart some of my ideas into smaller shareable clips and because of some of the subjects we’re talking about youtube is not favorable to us and so make sure to subscribe and to share these videos on your own so that we can get these ideas out there for those who are watching this as it’s just coming out teespring is offering a full sale until the end of the weekend and so you can use the code word hey ride to get 10% off symbolic world merchandise it’s a good time to buy all those great christmas gifts for lovers of symbolism and so thanks everybody for your support and for your time and i will talk to you very soon